Canyon Sacrifice. Scott Graham
sun. Mesmerizing at sunrise and sunset, the view of the canyon this time of day was a hazy muddle of weak reds, dusty tans, and indistinct browns bisected by the blurry gray ribbon of the Colorado River far below.
In a monotone as drab and colorless as the midday canyon depths, the driver delivered a stream of facts into a headset that carried her voice through speakers in the shuttle ceiling to her passengers: it was eight miles from the village to the end of the road at Hermit’s Rest, the canyon was more than a mile deep at its deepest point, the volume of water in the river averaged fifteen-thousand cubic feet per second, enough to satisfy the residential needs of ten million people downstream in Phoenix and Los Angeles.
The shuttle rounded a bend and the first stop on the route came into view. Flashing lights at the stop jolted Chuck out of his heat-induced torpor. The paved pullout on the right side of the road was lined with park vehicles—three pale-green ranger patrol sedans, an ambulance, a fire-rescue truck, and the gleaming, white, government-issue Chevy Suburban driven by Chief Ranger Robert Begay—all with their blue and red emergency lights flashing.
The shuttle driver broke from her monologue long enough to interject, with a glimmer of animation, “As you can see, we won’t be stopping at Maricopa Point this morning.”
Chuck leaned past Rosie’s slumped form to scan the rocky outcrop jutting from the canyon rim a hundred feet north of the line of vehicles. Just inside the railing at the far end of the point, where the promontory fell away straight down for more than a hundred feet, several park firefighters in heavy canvas pants, long-sleeved yellow shirts, and white helmets stuffed climbing ropes and ascending devices into large nylon duffels. Half a dozen rangers in standard park-service uniform—dark green slacks, gray dress shirts with shiny gold badges, and broad-brimmed hats—stood in a loose circle around something resting on the sunbaked stone surface of the overlook.
The firefighters and rangers were gathered at the head of the promontory, a good fifty feet beyond where Chuck had buried his fist in the oversized gut of the guy in the Isotopes sweatshirt. That had been hours ago. No way, Chuck assured himself, was this scene related to his earlier altercation. Looking closer, however, he saw that the rangers surrounded a large, black, plastic sack half-enclosed in wire mesh. A body bag, that’s what it was, encased in a tub-style search-and-rescue litter—and whoever was in the bag filled it to near-overflowing.
11 a.m.
Chuck squeezed his eyes shut. Could he have killed the guy he’d punched on Maricopa Point? As quickly as the question formed in his mind, he knew the answer. After all, his first fight very nearly had been his last.
He’d snuck into a Durango bar as a teenager and wound up drunk and shooting pool in the back room. In short order, he’d found himself down several hundred bucks to a gas-patch roughneck in worn jeans and a grease-stained T-shirt. Chuck displayed his empty pockets to the roughneck, who proceeded to jump him when he left the bar an hour later. A kick to his stomach ruptured his spleen; he’d required life-saving surgery. Chuck’s broken nose, crooked to this day, was the visible reminder of the beating he’d taken that night.
What if something had ripped open inside the guy’s gut when Chuck had punched him? Possible. Except the timing didn’t fit. The guy would not have died right away. Any serious injury would have sent him to the hospital in Flagstaff, eighty miles to the south. But the ambulance and other emergency vehicles were still here at the scene, a good four hours after the confrontation.
Chuck sucked a breath through his compressed lips. He hadn’t hit the guy hard enough to kill him. This was a coincidence, nothing more, the park vehicles, the flashing lights. Had to be. The rangers and firefighters were conducting a training exercise, that was it, and the body bag was filled with coils of ropes to provide ballast for the litter.
The shuttle bus trundled past the park-service cars and trucks lined along the pullout. In breaks between the vehicles, Chuck caught glimpses of the park staffers gathered on the point before a screen of piñons and junipers blocked his view.
The bus slowed when it approached Powell Lookout, half a mile past Maricopa Point. Chuck spoke over his shoulder to Janelle, leaving no time for her to break in. “I bet I know just about everybody back there.” He gestured out the rear of the shuttle in the direction of the point. “It’d be good for me to say ‘hey,’ see if somebody could show us around tomorrow, give us a behind-the-scenes tour.” He stood as the shuttle bus came to a stop. “You three go on out to Hermit’s Rest. I’ll catch the next shuttle and meet you there.”
“But—” Janelle began.
Chuck wagged what he hoped was a friendly finger to cut her off, then tousled Rosie’s hair, as if ditching Janelle and the girls in the middle of the first day of their first-ever vacation together was the most reasonable thing in the world. He made his way down the aisle and off the bus and set off at a jog along Rim Drive beneath the scorching sun, careful not to look back as the shuttle pulled away behind him.
He slowed to a walk when the overlook came into view. He was sweating hard, the front of his shirt sticking to his chest. He pulled his baseball cap low over his eyes and hung his thumbs in the front belt loops of his jeans with fake casualness while he peered anxiously ahead.
The firefighters had finished stowing their gear and were hauling their full duffels to the fire-rescue truck. The rangers still encircled the body bag in the mesh litter. Chuck noted that the distinct form of a human body, not coils of ropes, pressed outward from inside the bag—the broad outline of shoulders, arms tucked at the sides of a large stomach, feet pointing upward. He stopped at the edge of the road. He never should have left the shuttle.
He took a step backward, but before he could make his getaway, a ranger climbed from an idling patrol sedan parked at the head of the line of vehicles.
“Chuck? That you? Christ, how long’s it been?”
The ranger, tall and in his late forties, had a graying, bushy blond mustache. His wide stance supported a compact potbelly that pressed at the buttons of his shirt. He stood with his elbows cocked outward like the wings of a bird, his hands resting on the bulky sidearm belted to his right hip and extra magazine pouch strapped to his left. Purple splotches marked the ranger’s face, the result, Chuck knew, of years of heavy drinking.
“Donald,” Chuck answered. Ranger Donald Podalski had been assigned to oversee Chuck’s work in the park on several occasions. Chuck indicated the firefighters and rangers on the promontory. “What’s going on?”
“Guy took a tumble.” Donald gave a descending whistle and imitated with his hand someone falling off a cliff. “Girlfriend says it was an accident, buuuut . . .”
Cliff-jump suicides weren’t uncommon at the canyon, though it always amazed Chuck that such despondency could remain unaffected by the canyon’s beauty. Accidental cliff falls were a regular occurrence at the canyon as well, one or two a year. Reported as suicide or accident, however, there was always the question whether a push might have been involved.
Chuck tugged his sweat-dampened shirt away from his chest. “Witnesses?”
“A bunch of Jap tourists, but they hardly spoke any English, and their guide, she was too freaked to do much translating. Doesn’t sound like they saw much, anyway. The girlfriend was the only one close, taking his picture way out at the end of the point.”
Chuck put a hand to the scratches on his neck. So. The guy in the Isotopes sweatshirt was dead—and, thankfully, Chuck’s punch wasn’t the cause. But had the girlfriend reported the fight with Chuck that had preceded the fall?
“Where is she?”
“Begay let her go.” Donald pointed at one of the park staffers gathered around the litter: Grand Canyon National Park Chief Ranger Robert Begay.
Fiftyish, smoothly professional, always impeccably groomed, Robert had been handpicked by park-service honchos in D.C. for the chief ranger post. His first year as head ranger at